Volume 32, Issue 6 pp. 1880-1888
RESEARCH ARTICLE

SKMAT-U-Net architecture for breast mass segmentation

S. R. Sannasi Chakravarthy

Corresponding Author

S. R. Sannasi Chakravarthy

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Bannari Amman Institute of Technology, Sathyamangalam, India

Correspondence

S. R. Sannasi Chakravarthy, Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Bannari Amman Institute of Technology, Sathyamangalam 638401, India.

Email: [email protected]

Search for more papers by this author
Harikumar Rajaguru

Harikumar Rajaguru

Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Bannari Amman Institute of Technology, Sathyamangalam, India

Search for more papers by this author
First published: 25 June 2022

Abstract

Being a deadly disease, breast cancer provides higher global mortality among women. The challenge in employing ultrasound imaging for breast cancer diagnosis lies in the segmentation part. Thus, the work intends to segment the breast cancer ultrasound images using the deep learning approach. The U-shaped convolution neural network, U-Net, has become popular and efficient for biomedical image segmentation. Specifically, the paper proposes an improved version, SKMAT-U-Net, where a selective kernel (SK) utilizes an attention mechanism to adjust the receptive fields of the network and combine feature maps extricated with dilated and standard convolution operations. Next, based on the conventional cross-entropy loss function, four attention loss functions are integrated to form the Mixed Attention Loss Function (MAT) based U-Net. Thus, the SKMAT-U-Net model is proposed to segment the lesions effectively in breast ultrasound images. The results obtained indicated that the proposed U-Net model provides a better Dice score (0.929) than others.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships which have, or could be perceived to have, influenced the work reported in this article.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

Breast Ultrasound Images have been used in this study for experimentation and evaluation of the proposed system and are available in the repository, https://scholar.cu.edu.eg/?q=afahmy/pages/dataset.

The full text of this article hosted at iucr.org is unavailable due to technical difficulties.